During the production of 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, Jean-Luc Godard explained its raison d'être: "I want to include everything, sport, politics, even groceries." After nearly 60 years and countless pages of critical hypothesizing, nobody has distilled the film's subjects quite so concisely. Alternatively, one might describe it as a hermetic personal essay covering both the changing face of mid-century Parisian culture and the horrors of the American war machine, rendered in the language of popular television, comic books, and CinemaScope spectacle via riotous, eye-searing art direction in every primary color. With a plot inspired by a journalistic exposé on a supposedly popular side-hustle for suburban French housewives, the film unfolds over a day, following wife and mother Juliette (Marina Vlady) as she runs some errands, does a little bit of (weird) sex work, and eventually returns home to her family. Amid this wisp of a narrative, Godard connects, via his own whispered narration, the banalities of consumer culture to the international atrocities that keep it afloat, cramming in innumerable gags, quotations, digressive episodes, bleak suburban panoramas, and a haunting exegesis on finding galaxies in a cup of coffee. (Text Courtesy of Chicago Film Society)

35mm from Rialto Pictures, permission Janus Films

Preceded by: "Qolga (Umbrella)" (Mikheil Kobakhidze, 1966) – 20 min – 35mm from the Chicago Film Society